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Daily Bafflements

The Verge brings us a lovingly crafted five-part feature on The Baffler’s favorite presidential candidate, the transhumanist, coffin-bus-driving Zoltan Istvan.

• Pantone has picked its 2016 colors of the year. The company made waves by selecting two colors, instead of one, for 2016—“Rose Quartz” and “Serenity,” a pale pink and blue, respectively. The company claims that the pair of tones, reminiscent of a baby shower in hell, will promote gender equality in the new year.

• After a recent terrorist attack on one of its clinics, and amidst reports from the Wall Street Journal to Teen Vogue on yesterday’s Senate vote to defund Planned Parenthood (broadly considered to be a symbolic move, since the president has promised to veto the legislation), the health care provider has emblazoned its website with a simple message: “these doors stay open.”

• At Tufts University’s Human-Robot Interaction Lab, researchers are doing the stuff of sci-fi authors’ nightmares—teaching robots to say “no.”